Through the Darkness

Panfilo laughed at him. “Don’t be dumber than you can help. Nobody cares a sour fart for what a common footslogger thinks--or a sergeant, either, come to that. Now Spinello--Spinello they’ll listen to. He’s got himself a fancy pedigree, he does. But I bet he doesn’t care one way or the other what happens to Unkerlanter captives.”

“He’s not interested in laying them, so why should he care?” Trasone returned, and got a laugh from the sergeant.

Neither one of them was laughing a few minutes later, when a flight of Unkerlanter dragons streaked toward them out of the trackless west. Because the Unkerlanters painted their beasts rock-gray, and because they came in low and fast, Trasone and his comrades didn’t see them till they were almost on top of the Algarvians. A tongue of flame reached out for him as a dragon breathed fire.

Trasone threw himself flat. The flame fell short. He felt an instant’s intense heat and did not breathe. Then the dragon raced by. The wind of its passage blew dust and grit into Trasone’s face.

He rolled from his belly to his back so he could blaze at the Unkerlanter dragons. He knew how slim his chances of hurting one were, but blazed anyhow. Stranger things had happened in this war. As far as he was concerned, that the Unkerlanters were still fighting was one of those stranger things.

A dragon flamed an Algarvian behemoth. The soldiers riding the behemoth died at once, without even the chance to scream. Partly shielded by its armor, the beast took longer to perish. Bellowing in agony, flames dripping from it and starting fires in the grass, it galloped heavily till at last it fell over and lay kicking. Even then, it bawled on and on.

“There’s supper,” Trasone said, pointing. “Roasted in its own pan.”

Panfilo lay sprawled in the dirt a few feet away. “If this were last winter, roast behemoth would be supper--and we’d be cursed glad to have it, too.”

“Don’t I know it,” Trasone answered. “What? Did you think I was kidding? There’s not a man with a frozen-meat medal”--the decoration given for surviving the first winter’s savage fighting in Unkerlant--”who’ll do much kidding about behemoth meat, except the ones who ate mule or unicorn instead.”

“Or the ones who didn’t eat anything,” Sergeant Panfilo said.

“They’re mostly dead by now.” Trasone got to his feet. “Well, we’d better keep going and hope those buggers don’t come back. Our dragonfliers are better than the Unkerlanters’ any day, but they can’t be everywhere at once.”

Now Panfilo was the one to say, “Don’t I know it.” He went on, “When we started this cursed fight, did you have any notion how stinking big Unkerlant was?”

“Not me,” Trasone answered at once. “Powers below eat me if I don’t now, though. I’ve walked every foot of it--and a lot of those feet going forwards and then backwards and then forwards again.” And he hadn’t walked enough of Unkerlant, either. He hadn’t marched into Cottbus, and neither had any other Algarvian.

It still might happen. He knew that. Despite Unkerlanter dragons, King Mezentio’s army was rolling forward again here in the south. Take away Unkerlant’s breadbasket, take away the cinnabar that helped her dragons flame . . . Trasone nodded. Let’s see Swemmel fight a war once we have all this stuff, he thought.

“Come on!” Major Spinello shouted. “We’re not going to win this cursed war sitting on our arses. Get moving! Get moving!” Trasone glanced toward Sergeant Panfilo. Panfilo waved the squad forward. On they went, into the vastness of Unkerlant.

Marshal Rathar scowled at the map in his office. With his heavy Unkerlanter features, he had a face made for scowling. He ran a hand through his iron-gray hair. “Curse the Algarvians,” he growled. “They’ve got the bit between their teeth again.” He glared at his adjutant, as if it were Major Merovec’s fault.

“They didn’t do quite what we expected, no, sir,” Merovec agreed.

That we was courteous on Merovec’s part. Rathar had thought the Algarvians would strike hard for Cottbus again once the spring thaw ended and the ground firmed up. Had he been commanding King Mezentio’s troopers, that was what he would have done. He’d strengthened the center against the assault he’d expected. But Mezentio’s generals looked to have moved more of their men into the south, and had forced one breakthrough after another there.

“We’re not going to be able to stop them down there, not for a while,” Rathar said. Merovec could do nothing but nod. The advances the Algarvians had already made ensured that they would make more. They’d seized enough ley lines to make bringing reinforcements down from the north much harder. And Unkerlant didn’t have enough soldiers west of the Duchy of Grelz to stop the redheads, or even to slow them down very much.

Merovec said, “If we’d known they were building up for their own campaign south of Aspang...”